It's Now Possible To Play Netflix Natively On Linux Without Wine Plug-Ins

Going back for a few years it's been possible to play Netflix movies on Linux using some hacks like with running Microsoft Silverlight on a modified version of Wine. More recently, Pipelight has been working out well as a easy-to-use solution for getting Netflix movies to play on Linux web-browsers, albeit it's still not a native experience. Fortunately, times are quickly changing.

According to reader reports this Saturday morning, with just modifying the user-agent of the latest beta version of Google's Chrome web browser, it's possible to get Netflix running natively on Linux. Thanks to DRM support with HTML5 and Google's Chrome developers moving quick to implement the support that's backed by Netflix, you can today run Chrome and play Netflix videos without having to use Pipelight or any other plug-ins -- the support simply works through having DRM'ed HTML5 video support.

It's not as easy though right now just firing up Chrome 38 Beta on Linux to play Netflix, but you first need to switch the reported HTTP user-agent string. You can grab the user agent switcher for Chrome and then change the user-agent string for your Linux Chrome browser to "( Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2049.0 Safari/537.36 )" Following that, you should be able to go to Netflix and begin playing your favorite films or TV shows. Hopefully Netflix will begin to officially support the Chrome Linux build in the near future. The steps were shared with us by Nathan VanCamp.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.